New market opportunities to emerge for entry-level cloud MSPs with increasing migration to the cloud, as per a 451 Microsoft commissioned research that was unveiled in Microsoft Hosting and Cloud Summit 2017 at Bellevue, last month.
Public cloud spending is expected to reach $500B by 2020 as per the IDC CloudView 2016 Survey, due to key change drivers like – CTO/IT, EOL technologies, Shadow IT and more. The role of the Private/Hybrid cloud is expected be the most relevant in the coming times. As per a Pulse Gatepoint Research, March 2016, 46% of customers prefer Azure over any other public cloud, with AWS standing at 42%.
All this and more data were revealed through a study called Workload and Application migration to Azure – Your Path to Recurring Revenue at MHS 2017 which discussed about the reasons behind such migrations and how MSPs can make use of this opportunity.
Various factors were identified as being the top triggers for huge Customer Workload migrations like cost reductions from CAPEX to OPEX, DC modernization, increasing DC operational costs, need of modern security for modern day threats, regulatory compliance requirement, and business continuity. Other reasons pointed towards increasing need for business agility, time to value, and issues in managing co-location licenses.
Another Markets and Markets research – Cloud Migration Services Market – Global Forecast 2016-2021, that was discussed, showed the size of the cloud migration market in 2016. Cloud migration market is expected to grow from USD $2.40 billion in 2016 to USD $7.10 billion in 2020.
As per the research, customers who will move their infra or applications on cloud will need help from third party solution providers which is a good news for managed service providers. Azure partners stand to gain by offering Advanced Managed Services (Analytics, IoT, AI), Workload optimization, Cloud workload management services and Assessment and Migration.
Microsoft also introduced “Migration in a Box” tool for boosting up the entire migration process and helping partners conduct successful migration with less complexities. The kit will have complete scoping, roadmap to migration allowing discovery of current servers, applications, and workloads. Partners can access map dependencies, select tools and forecast ROI and deliver actual migration.
